"Things are bad"

I like to read about the sea. I have a somewhat ironic attachment to grim stories about shipwrecked sailors having to eat each other and so on, but this is a safe kind of fascination, given the usual situating of these stories in the 19th or earlier centuries. Tragically, people still die horrible deaths at sea. The Guardian carried this grim story the other day:

'After four months at sea, ghost ship with 11 petrified corpses washes up in Barbados'

It tells of some unfortunate Africans who paid money to be transported in a motorised yacht to a possible better life in the Canaries. At some point the yacht was being towed by the people smugglers, but the line was cut with a machete and the would-be migrants left to die over the following weeks. One of them was a Mr Diaw Sounkar Diemi, and he left a note before he died, three words from which head this post.